What is the difference between a wildcard relation and granting access to every user individually?

A wildcard relation expresses the policy once in the schema and lets the authorization engine evaluate any subject of the supported type as public. Granting access individually requires writing a relationship for every user, which scales poorly and makes revocation, auditing, and ongoing maintenance far more difficult.

What the policy model is actually expressing

The real difference is between expressing authorization as a schema-level rule and expressing it as a list of per-subject grants. A wildcard relation says the object is publicly accessible to any supported subject type, so the authorization engine can evaluate membership without storing a relationship for each user. That changes the policy from enumerated access control to a broad, rule-based exception.

Granting access individually is the opposite model. Each user must be written into the relationship set, which makes the policy explicit but also more operationally heavy. The access result may be the same for a given moment, but the maintenance model is very different: one is derived from a rule, the other from many discrete records.

Why the operational difference matters

The scale difference becomes visible as soon as the user population grows or changes often. Individual grants create more write volume, more review work, and more opportunities for stale access to persist after a user should no longer have it. In practice, that means revocation and recertification become relationship-management problems rather than a simple policy update.

The wildcard form also changes how teams reason about auditability. With individual grants, an auditor can inspect a concrete list of subjects. With a wildcard relation, the control question shifts to whether the broad public-access rule is intended, bounded, and safe for the resource class. For public or low-risk content, that is acceptable; for sensitive objects, it can become an overly permissive shortcut.

When public access is implemented through an authorization engine, the useful comparison is not just convenience versus verbosity. It is whether you want access to be expressed once as a policy or scattered across many subject records. The former is easier to operate, while the latter is easier to explain at the individual-user level.

When to prefer one approach over the other

Use a wildcard relation when the resource is genuinely intended to be public to that subject type and the main concern is keeping the schema compact and the policy easy to maintain. Use individual grants when access must be tightly bounded, subject-specific, or revocable on a per-user basis without affecting everyone else.

What to verify: Confirm that the wildcard is truly meant to represent public access for the full supported subject type, not an accidental broadening of scope. If the access model is meant to encode exceptions, individualized relationships are the safer fit because they preserve explicit ownership and reviewability.

Common mistake: Treating per-user grants as the default for everything, even when the policy is simply “public for this class of reader.” That approach adds maintenance overhead without improving control, and it tends to fail first in revocation hygiene and policy drift.

Practitioner takeaway: Choose the representation that matches the governance intent, not just the current access outcome, because the long-term risk is usually policy sprawl and stale permissions, not the syntax itself.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Public-by-wildcard access can be safe when the object is intentionally public, but it becomes risky when teams use it as a convenience mechanism for data that should have narrower scope. The failure mode is broad exposure hidden behind a compact schema rule, which can make reviews, change control, and exception handling less visible than they appear.

Failure mechanism: A wildcard relation can bypass the discipline of explicit subject enumeration, so access grows by design rather than by reviewed assignment. If the surrounding governance process is weak, that can leave sensitive resources effectively public when the team believed they were merely simplifying policy.

Impact: The result is wider-than-intended access, harder revocation decisions, and a larger blast radius if the underlying resource should have been restricted. This is especially material where access decisions must be auditable and where “public” is not the same as “acceptable for every user.”

Standards & Framework Alignment

This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.

OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while CIS Controls v8, NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.

Framework	Control / Reference	Relevance
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10	NHI-01 — Access and Privilege Control	Wildcards and per-user grants both shape authorization scope and privilege boundaries.
	NHI-02 — Secrets and Credential Management	Broad access models can magnify the impact of leaked or reused access material.
Recommendation — Use least-privilege rules and explicitly bound public access to prevent broad exposure. Limit credential blast radius and avoid broad access paths that are hard to revoke.
CIS Controls v8	6 — Access Control Management	The question is about how access is granted and maintained at scale.
Recommendation — Standardise access grants and review pathways so revocation stays manageable.
NIST CSF 2.0	PR.AC — Access Control	The subject concerns how authorization is represented and enforced.
	GV.PO — Policy	Choosing wildcard versus individual grants is a policy design decision with governance impact.
Recommendation — Apply access-control policy that distinguishes public scope from individually granted access. Define which resources may use broad policy rules versus explicit subject grants.
NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207)	PL-2 — Policy Enforcement Points	Wildcard relations and per-user grants are enforced through the policy decision path.
Recommendation — Enforce policy centrally so broad access is deliberate and consistently evaluated.

Practitioner Guidance

Decision rule: If the resource is meant to be public to the supported subject type, model that intent as a wildcard relation and document the scope boundary. If access must vary by person, use individual grants so revocation and review are explicit rather than inferred.

What to measure: Watch for the ratio of explicit grants to wildcarded objects, and treat sudden growth in per-user relationships as a signal that the policy should be re-evaluated for maintainability. A healthy model is one where public access is deliberate and exceptional access is traceable.

Practitioner takeaway: The key judgment is whether the access rule is truly category-based or actually person-specific, because that choice determines whether you are managing a policy or a permission list.